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Software To Evaluate Facial Expressions Developed
The Technology Review site has up an article on new software that can do quantitative analysis of facial expressions, detecting whether a person is smiling. The software was developed by the Omron Corporation, and can also estimate a subject's age and gender, or verify a person's identity from a database. Though the company doesn't yet know whether it plans to release the software commercially, there are a number of obvious applications. "Omron envisions the smile software being used in marketing, perhaps to evaluate consumers' reactions to a new product or to an advertising campaign. A smile checker could also help train customer-service staff to meet Japan's legendarily high standards ... A smile in isolation is easy to detect, but the bigger challenge is to develop systems that can recognize the concerto of facial actions that make up complex expressions like confusion, fear, and disgust." Thanks to jamie for the link.
In a much overlooked section of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson postulated that the real key to making the Metaverse a place where things happen and where people want to interact with each other was the inclusion of facial expressions. I tend to agree with him - look at how emoticons are used on the web today; we've had articles about their usage bleeding into corporate culture to help people understand the intended subtext of a message. A bunch of avatars walking around with a fixed look on their faces makes for a boring virtual world and more miscommunication than communication. Facial expression replication (which does not necessarily include recognition, but I think it'll help immensely) will be needed before virtual worlds really take off for society at large.
Your brain is not a computer.
There is a particularly scary application for this type of software. Imagine surveillance cameras scanning a political rally. (Putin's new Russia comes to mind, but you can insert your own favorite government here as you please.) An advanced system could detect dissent by individuals' facial expressions during the rally, and deal with it appropriately. Sometimes facial expressions happen subconsciously. You have to focus to maintain a poker-face.
</Paranoia>
From a computer-science perspective, I find this stuff fascinating. But anything that can gauge a person's emotions, especially if they don't know they're being watched, has a lot of room for abuse.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.